Marc Faber : The next Crisis will be much worse

Marc Faber : Well, I think that if you look at the history of crisis in the last, say, thirty years, each one was greater and larger. And, we had to mash that grain down so they printed money and so what did they produce, the housing bubble, and then even the worst crisis and the financial crisis. And, now they essentially give themselves the problems but they say alleviated the symptoms of the problems. And, I think the next crisis will be much worse. But, the question is, you know, as I said earlier, how do you protect yourself in the next crisis? Do you own equities, sovereign bonds, cash, commodities, gold, precious metals, and so forth. And, my view is that you’re probably better off in precious metals and in equities than in cash and in bonds. And I also happen to believe that in some parts of the U.S., notably the south, Phoenix, Atlanta, Las Vegas, where real estate prices are bottoming out. Now can they drop another ten percent? We are sure another drop of ten percent is not the end of the world when you consider that most individuals were in the NASDAQ in 2000 and then it dropped seventy percent. So I’m not saying that real estate will go up substantially, I’m just saying now you can buy real estate in the south of the U.S. at, say, thirty to forty percent discount to the construction costs. So I think it's reasonably priced. I don’t think it's – yeah, actually I think on global standards it's relatively cheap. But, my wider view is, you know, since 1982 we had the colossal asset inflation in equities, in real estate, and since 1998 also in commodities. One day this asset inflation will come to an end. The way the consumer price inflation in the 70s came to an end in, say, 1980 and thereafter we had this inflation. So it may be that the asset price inflation will not vanish altogether but we may be in a period of disinflation so if people are investing money maybe they should adjust to the reality that the returns in the future will not be ten or twenty percent per annum but may only, say, two percent or three percent above the rate of inflation. And, in terms of bonds and cash it will be, say, five percent below the level of inflation. - in Chris Martenson interview
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Marc Faber : We have a Credit addicted Economy

Marc Faber : Well, you could build a conspiracy theory. Basically the U.S. had a significant increase in the average household income in real terms from the late 1940s to essentially the mid-1960s. And, then inflation began to bite and real income growth slowed down. Then came the 1980s and in order not to disappoint the household income recipients you essentially printed money and had a huge debt expansion. So if you have an economic system and you suddenly grow your debt at a very high rate, it's like an injection of a stimulant of steroids. So the economy grew at the relatively fast pace but built on additional debt. And, this obviously cannot go on forever. It went on for much longer than I thought because I started to write about excessive debt growth already in the late 80s, I was very early about this. But when it comes to an end you have a problem. So the Fed had never paid any attention, the Fed is about the worse economic forecast you can imagine. They are academics. They never go to a local pub. They never go shopping or they lie but basically they are a bunch of people who never worked a single day in their lives. They’re not businessmen. They have to balance the books, earn some money by selling goods, and pay the expenditure, they get paid by the government. And, so these people have no clue about the economy. And, so what happens is they never paid any attention to excessive credit growth and let me remind you, between 2000 and 2007, credit growth was five times the growth of the economy in nominal terms. In other words, in order to create one dollar of GDP, you had to borrow another five dollars from the credit market. Now this came to an end in 2008. Now the Fed have never paid any attention to credit growth, they realized if we have a credit addicted economy and credit growth slows down we have to print money. So that’s what they did. But believe me it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that if you print money you don’t create prosperity. Otherwise, every country would be unbelievably rich because every country would print money and be happy thereafter. - in Chris Martenson interview
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